Tuesday, 21 June 2011

When The ‘Yuck’ Factor Costs Money…

Health experts said the incident would not have caused any harm to people in the city of Portland, who are supplied with drinking water from the reservoir.

They said the average human bladder holds only six to eight ounces, and the urine would have been vastly diluted.

And besides, don’t they know what fish, ducks and otters do in it?

But no, something must be done!

But David Shaff, an administrator at the Portland Water Bureau, defended the decision to empty the lake.

"There are people who will say it's an over reaction. I don't think so. I think what you have to deal with here is the 'yuck' factor," he said.

In other words, you have to pander to the simpletons, the idiots, the cretins who don’t realise that the Portland Water Bureau doesn’t just send an employee down to the water’s edge with a bucket to pour into the pipes taking that water to their homes and trailers. They chlorinate it first.

"I can imagine how many people would be saying 'I made orange juice with that water this morning.' "Do you want to drink pee? Most people are going to be pretty damn squeamish about that."

With a dilution factor 1 in 10^12 or greater there is a very good chance you wouldn't get a water molecule from the wee in any that you drank. Such a waste is stupid, especially as naturally occurring bacteria will break the organic components down. Any left will be degraded by chlorination. The man emptying the resevoir is an idiot.

That story puzzled me greatly, they showed a photo of a lake which clearly contained far more than [however many] millions of gallons stated; there is no way that you can drain a lake for as little as £22,000; such a small amount of wee is not going to harm anybody; wee is quite simply not poisonous in the first place etc.

I suspect that the true story is quite different, for example, maybe some eejit at the dam opened the sluices by mistake or something, and had to invent a cover story afterwards.

Actually, Chalcedon, there are more water molecules in six fluid ounces than there are six ounce glasses of water in all the oceans in the world.

There's about 1.3 x 10^21 kg of water in the oceans. A mole of water has a mass of 18g. So there's about 7.2 x 10^22 moles of water in the oceans. A mole is 6 x 10^23. So there's more molecules in a mole of water (about 0.6 fluid ounce) than there are moles in the oceans. Break-even is around 6ml, or a teaspoon.